Joint trajectory design and spectrum allocation for unmanned aerial vehicle task efficiency

Abstract

In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)‐assisted wireless sensor networks (WSNs), UAVs are employed to collect sensing data from each sensor node (SN). Because of limited battery capacity, shortening the time of data collection by the UAV is necessary. Notably, the task completion time is related to UAV trajectory and spectrum allocation. In this paper, joint trajectory design and spectrum allocation is studied to minimize the task completion time of UAVs while ensuring the target upload data amount for each SN. The cases that all SNs are located within the communication range of a UAV is explored first; the formulated problem is non‐convex and difficult to solve directly. Hence, an iterative algorithm based on block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation is proposed to decompose and transformed the original problem into two convex optimizations. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is applied to the general case that all SNs are widely distributed by leveraging the spiral algorithm and traveling salesman problem technique. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the task time of UAV compared to other benchmark algorithms.